Asheville developing a plan for $225 million in disaster recovery funding

The Facts: The Community Development Block Grant Disaster Recovery (CDBG-DR) program provides resources to communities impacted by a major disaster. From the City’s website: “These funds must be used to address unmet disaster-related needs, particularly in housing, economic revitalization, and infrastructure restoration.” 70% of this funding is supposed to directly impact “low and moderate income” people.

The final plan has been published and will be presented to (and voted on by) the Asheville City Council at their meeting this Tuesday, April 8th.

You can download the final plan here.

Our Assessment: We argued that it was critically important that this plan prioritize equity issues, with a special emphasis on racial equity. The City was deeply inequitable before the storm, and those problems have only been exacerbated since. A racially-just disaster “recovery” cannot simply seek to return our City to the pre-storm status quo, but must address the pre-existing (and now compounded) divides between different racial groups and economic classes.

With that in mind, we advocated for:

  • More deeply affordable housing. The original plan called for $26 million in new affordable housing, and the City bumped that up to $28 million. They changed the language in the criteria for selecting projects to emphasize “deep affordability.”

  • More small business support. The original plan called for $15 million in support of low to moderate income small business owners, and the City bumped that up to $17 million.

  • Better input from marginalized folks on how these funds should be used. We wanted the City to commit to funding improvements in our community connectivity infrastructure, through deeper engagement approaches like canvassing and neighborhood-level organizing. They increased the planning budget by $1 million, and described this kind of “community organizing” as a possible use of those funds.

While the final plan didn’t include other things we advocated for, like rental assistance and more money for workforce development, we appreciate that the City heard us and incorporated some of our recommendations in the final plan.